It also seems incredibly shortsighted. No fashion conscious person would have been caught dead wearing a smartwatch circa 2012, then Apple partnered with Hermes and eventually things changed. There are all sorts of valid complaints against this tech, but fashion is something so ephemeral that it's a silly to act like it is a long-term hindrance to adoption.

I find it to be an acceptable use of mockery, one of the most powerful cultural methods of exposing that the emperor has no clothes

I think there’s a difference between full-on “bullying” and what I’d call “blunt criticism”. I think bullying requires an intent to silence or otherwise coerce through fear. Blunt criticism is more about skipping the niceties and saying it plainly, and accepting that your subject might get offended as a result. Calling someone “tacky” is way more in the blunt criticism camp I think. It’s certainly not “nice”, but there’s no way that I read this blog article as trying to change Mark Zuckerberg’s mind through fear. Nobody is getting pilloried for being tacky, and tackiness can even be repositioned as desirable through the lens of nostalgia or similar.

Slips past the filters when “Voyeur glasses let you record your creepy interactions with females” gets flagged.

Does it make you feel like getting them out of spite? Real question.

They are billionaires, so it’s fine for us to make fun of them (because the joke is on us)

> I get a sense that the intent is more to persuade via bullying than anything else, which...I dunno. Doesn't feel great!

Most advertising persuades you with less-than-rational means. It's just fighting fire with fire.

And it's quite justified, because in this case, it punches up against a technology with a net-negative social impact.

Lack of bullying is exactly why the world is now run by sociopathic dorks like the ones pictured in the article

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That’s not what you see when you wear the glasses, you will see a symbol, a series of symbols, a facsimile of life that you will convince yourself is real.

It’s not elf like, it’s not magic, it’s not a sense, quite the opposite, it’s replacing sensing and processing with reading. The death of aptitude, prowess, and the human experience.

I wouldn’t say that “what if the world was digital!” is some kind of apex creative insight.

More practically the people in power need to own real estate. The metaverse, VR, AR, you’re giving these builders way too much credit by connecting it to creative expression.

They want to own the land.

Technically speaking, yeah, those things are cool. What’s not cool (anymore?) is that people like Zuck and other similar billionaires are behind such tech. I didn’t give a shit of the millionaires of the 80s/90s… but these billionaires of today, simply suck big time. So fuck them

You should be skeptical of industrial use case as well. Allowing any device with internet access and a camera on it onto the floor of most electronics manufacturing facility is a nonstarter, phones, smart glasses, or anything of that sort. The other thing is, smart glasses buy nothing over having PCs/assembly line machines with screens for HMI, and standard operating procedures can be printed on paper. Also, if you are actually an operator on an assembly line, wearing these glasses for 10 hours a day is the last thing you want at your job.

The case for them gets even worse for heavy manufacturing industry/trades, since you have to think about safety and liability now: what if these smart glasses fall into the machines and cause an accident? Can these smartglasses can withstand the environmental conditions in the workshop?

Industrial use-cases could end up as fundamentally different product though. Ex:

* Guiding someone through a complex assembly, it's going to be on pretty much all shift, with effects on thermal management and battery capacity.

* You'll want to swap batteries so that it can be used by another shift, which will take priority over fashion.

* It may also need to incorporate positioning markers and QR codes and external sensor data from a particular environment, sometimes taking preference over any general object recognition.

* Facial recognition won't figure very much.

* Ruggedness and repairability may be prioritized over miniaturization.

In other words, kind of like how the design and usage of freight trains isn't necessarily indicative of the design and usage of pickup trucks.

Are you sure?

Wasn’t HoloLens (from Microsoft) squarely aimed at this use case? What went wrong there?

In the long run it could spread from commercial to consumer scenarios; perhaps extra fast if there was adoption in the services sector.

I disagree. The idea humans will be in the loop and the best way to accelerate things is to teach them slightly faster is fundamentally flawed. Future industrial will be automated, the only humans who will need comprehension will be the maintenance staff or management, and they will have familiarity and/or alternate tooling rendering glasses a noncritical value add at best.

By the time that rolls around, this stuff will be available for cents on the dollar, just as Shenzhen showrooms were full of AR/VR hardware in 2015 and the industry has gone nowhere for 30+ years.

It would be amazing to be able to look at an equipment nameplate and pull up a cutsheet, installation and operations manual, etc.

Industrial use cases will be huge once software+AI are firing on all cylinders.

Industry has had entire VR rooms since at least the 1990's, when I saw one in use.

AR glasses are toys compared to what the big oil companies have been using to visualize underground strata since before Facebook et.al. even existed.

Pretending that they're going to revolutionize the industrial space is just grasping at straws to justify a gadget that nobody other than tech bros and perverts want.

Tons of sites do that, because everyone who designs websites is a moron.

He doesn't like Zuckerberg's glasses, but he likes using his same dirty tactics!

same question

I can just imagine people walking around in a daze while instagram reels play endlessly in their meta spy glasses.

The "smell" will be a pepper sprey! Why people can not just leave strangers alone? Always soliciting attention and "look at me" attitude!

Most people are not "isolating themselves", they have stuff to do and places to be. They do not want to talk about some animal, or current issue of today!

you can already do this with your phone without casually and needlessly invading the privacy of everyone around you

Agreed, I can't even remember to wear my prescription eyeglasses that help me see and not get a headache. No chance I'm going to wear worse, heavier, more expensive glasses so I can take pictures and have AI talk to me 24/7.

I guess I'll move to a cabin in the woods.

VR is for games, AR is for businesses.

I've seen legit-useful AR apps for doctors/surgeons, dentists, firefighters, law enforcement, warehouse workers, etc. Basically anything where you need to be out in the real world doing something that would benefit from having situational-awareness of other non-visual conditions. This is a pretty wide swath of professions, with a lot of potential to save lives. Just having a patient's vital signs projected while a surgeon operates could prevent many deaths on the operating table, along with lots of fuck-ups like leaving a scalpel behind in the patient.

I did quite a bit of work in VR about a decade ago. The VR vs AR delineation was a constant conversation back then too. In meetings, at the bar, and so on: “This VR sure isn’t great but just you wait, AR will be the good one”…

But in reality it’s splitting hairs. Similar to discussing which tone pot values are better for your Stratocaster. Most people just don’t care, nor should they! “Stop trying to make fetch happen” as they say.

I’m inclined to believe in a future a bit less binary and more MR in general. Devices that can handle a variety of experiences from 1% augmented to 100% virtual.

> AR adds

what really worries me would be AR ads

> sold a few million camera glasses for pervs

I think that’s a reasonable characterisation of what people think of these devices.

Even if not strictly for perving it’s still seriously uncool to go around pointing a camera at people 100% of the time. So maybe ‘glasses for inconsiderate people who are sometimes also pervs’ is a better description?

Ya.. if they can't admit they're fantastic for cycling or other activities where you want hands free access to some of your phones capabilities and don't want your ears obscured, then they aren't being intellectually honest in the argument. I think that's what most people actually get them for.

The Meta glasses camera has a very wide field of view. You'd need to be quite close to a person to realistically take "pervy" photos, and it'd be really obvious. Seems like it'd be no better at this than a cell phone.